Vénus et Fleur [2004)

Why?

Why sexual tension.

Why do we like who we like.

Why do we choose certain people.

We must make a choice.

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Vénus et Fleur operates on the principle of sexual tension.

The world turns on the tips of tits.

We can wait a lifetime.

20 years.

Or 1 hr. and 16 minutes (in this case).

To see the bride stripped bare.

In the end, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

If it happens or not.

Because the journey has been sustained by sexual tension.

So I will give director Emmanuel Mouret credit.

He buoyed a whole film on the prospect of nudity.

There is some nudity here, but perhaps not the nudity which we seek.

That is my take.

Like Finnegans Wake.

Something is disallowed.

Something is taboo.

It is our puritanical instinct which causes us shame.

One would think such honi soit would only be found in England.

We become tangled in a web of meaning.

That any French person could feel shame is astounding.

But Fleur feels it.

She in an SJW.

A BBW.

Honestly, Isabelle Pirès is stunning here!

She is the reason I kept watching.

Sure, her character can be pitifully PC.

As when she lectures the third world about their plight.

It is maudlin.

Or is Russia the second world?

It was second.

But what is it now?

Doesn’t matter.

People still get drunk and fuck.

Says Venus.

Marseille.

Beautiful film.

Keep hoping.

And Veroushka Knoge reminds us of yet another lover.

Love is quintessentially French.

Four films and then career falls off.

Tough.

Magic moment by the sea.

-PD

The Disorderly Orderly [1964)

So here’s another movie I was wrong about.

Kinda like how I was wrong about Stan Laurel appearing in The Bellboy.

At least I think I was wrong.

Did I say that?

Because it turns out it was an impersonator.

But back to this here movie.

I couldn’t appreciate it on first viewing (all couple minutes I lasted) because Jerry’s style was so pungent.

Jerry Lewis.

A new star in my firmament.

Peter Sellers still reigns supreme in my pantheon.

And Sacha Baron Cohen still takes the cake for living comedians.

But Jerry Lewis is breathing down Peter’s neck.

And so this film ranks up there.

The Nutty Professor is still probably the best.

And Cinderfella holds a dear spot in my heart because it was the film which proved to me that Lewis was not merely a one-hit-wonder.

And The Ladies Man is really one of the artful, top Lewis films.

And so The Disorderly Orderly is in this rarefied air.

It’s better than The Bellboy.

It’s better than The Family Jewels.

Hell… Maybe I should watch those again!

But really.

Jerry Lewis was super-talented.

Indeed, let’s delineate a bit.

Lewis directed (and starred in) The Nutty Professor.

But Cinderfella, an earlier film, was directed by the great Frank Tashlin.

Why great?

Lewis deftly directed The Ladies Man while starring in it as well.

But Tashlin was back as director for this film (The Disorderly Orderly).

And so Tash was integral to the career of Jerry Lewis.

I really can’t imagine Jerry’s oeuvre without a Cinderfella.

It is indispensable.

While The Disorderly Orderly might be slightly less timeless, it is still quite an achievement.

Verily, it is a strange film (truth be told).

Indeed, about 3/4ths the way through, our film takes a turn towards dark, psychological energy.

Dreams.

Nightmares, really.

Shame.

Transgression.

Jerry Lewis as a peeping tom is bizarre.

As a stalker.

[especially considering that the real-life Lewis would be stalked in the ’90s by a man named Gary Benson (who subsequently spent four years in prison…ostensibly for stalking Lewis {according to the infallible Wikipedia})]

Humiliation.

Let’s dissect.

There should be some comparison to Mel Brooks’s’s High Anxiety.

“neurotic identification empathy”

Amen, brother!!!

Let’s list the timeless characters:

Julius Kelp

Fella (!)

Herbert H. Heebert [whose moniker bears a striking resemblance to Nabokov’s world-class pervert Humbert Humbert]

and Jerome Littlefield.

This list will grow.

Soon.

But for now, we can consider the timelessness of dear, squeamish Jerome Littlefield.

Too sensitive for this world.

Definitely too sensitive to be an MD!

The whole drama with psych patient Susan Oliver is thoroughly bizarre.

The film language dips from a rollercoaster zenith to a stomach-bottom nadir.

WTF, Jerry Lewis? WTF?!?

But remember, this is a Frank Tashlin film.

Or is it???

Every Jerry Lewis film is THOROUGHLY DOMINATED BY HIM.

It is obvious that improvisation plays a large part in the final product.

Not to mention silent gestures which loom larger than any script ever could.

Suffice it to say, The Disorderly Orderly is a sort of “flawed masterpiece”.

No, it’s not on the level of La Règle du jeu, but Frank Tashlin was no Jean Renoir.

And yet…Jerry Lewis was.

In his own way.

Which brings us to a perfect non-ending.

Jerry Lewis is an essential part of French cinema.

Put that in your ceci-n’est-pas-une-pipe and smoke it!

-PD

Twin Peaks “Rest in Pain” [1990)

Science thinks it knows what religion doesn’t.

Religion thinks it knows what science doesn’t.

Science thinks.

Religion feels.

Romance is a sort of religion.

Unthinking.

But beautiful.

These are the issues in this rather unremarkable episode of Twin Peaks.

The romance of film criticism seeks to give no spoilers.

Break the code, solve the case.

Handwriting analysis…seems as old and mystical as phrenology.

Because today it is stylometry.

Were it not for Snowden, we’d still be in the dark.

ABSENCE OF LIGHT.

Hoping David Sanborn makes an album called Kryptos.

Or not.

I INSERTED THE CANDLE.

CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER.

EMERGED FROM THE MIST.

There’s easier ways to get jobs.

To make verb tenses agree.

And to verb agreements tense.

Word pie lay.

The fragments are essential.

Each piece.

Piece by piece.

With ice cream on the side.

Huckleberry H.

Scalia was whisked off.

Like a broom.

He had been a jack of one-eyed secret society. Guest. SS.

Pound’s poetry didn’t go this deep.

But deeper.

To Colombian hell.

It’s trying to think.

Puttin’ on the Ritz.

I thought it was her.

A cipher.

Shame on me.

Eric Da Re. Doremi Fasol Latido.

Rest in pain.

Jawohl.

The biggest asshole in television history.

Vs. a perception sharpest blade mind ever.

Even for an actor.

Kyle MacLachlan.

Sherlock Holmes.

A perverse sense of knowing.

Raymond Chandler.

Several stops and starts to get here.

Like the end of Vivre sa vie.

And like the beginning.

Michel Legrand subject to the most genius whims ever.

Lynch is our Godard.

Where the Germans have Schoenberg, we have Ives.

Not the best metaphor.

But perfect.

Length trying your patience.

I know.

Like the end of Vivre sa vie.

Where we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

That is the bathos of mechanical mayhem. Haywire sob hiccups.

G’uh g’uh g’uh.

Over and over and over and over and over again.

The Vladimir Poutine syndicate have goldBRICked with the Meow Zedong overseas intelligence amoeba to form a truly Quebecois brand of! Godspeed.

Kinda like that hockey scene from Strange Brew.

Messiaen at the organ.

ils.

Sont. Hellfire. Bohemian.

No Moloch or Moulouk can do it justice.

Moulouk vs. Bébert.

Oui. C’est Ça.

There’s always two sets of books.

-PD

خمس كاميرات محطمة‎ [2011)

[5 BROKEN CAMERAS (2011)]

Israel is the most shameful country on Earth.

But America is not far behind.

Israeli soldiers are cowardly, repugnant beasts.

With their high-tech weapons.

It is the same for America.

The Jews of Israel who occupy the Palestinian West Bank are disgusting semblances of human life.

They need their walls.

They need to steal land.

Oh, sounds very progressive for the cause of Zion.

So very brave that these automata in their yarmulkes move in to the olive fields of Arabs.

They set the olive trees on fire.

That sounds like an outrageous claim.

But it is nothing compared to kidnapping children.

The Israeli military kidnaps children in West Bank villages.

Why?

To try and terrorize these subsistence farmers into ceasing their protests.

And why are these farmers from small villages protesting?

Because their land is being gobbled up little by little.

“Hey, I was using that land…by the way.”

Picking olives.

So the Israeli Humvees roll in at night.

Spielberg’s pathetic imagination could never conjure what documentary filmmaker Emad Burnat captured on film.

Israelis should be puking in the streets and smearing themselves with their own shit…in shame for what their military does in their name.

And America is not far behind.

Israeli soldiers with weak faces knocking on the doors in a West Bank village.

If there are children inside, the children are taken.

It is shock and awe…Stockholm syndrome…terroristic tactics of which Goebbels would have approved.

The weak Jews who move into settlements (concrete apartment blocks) on stolen land.

All they can yell is, “I’ll sue you. I’ll sue you.”

How dare you film me as I move into my new patriotic Israeli home?

How dare you film the scramble of settlers eager to establish false legitimacy?

What kind sick people allow their military to shoot at children?

In this film.

Never a single gun among the Palestinians.

The only rocks they throw are when the Israeli stormtroopers roll through their village in an arrogant convoy.

But the children who are shot…

The incessant tear gas…

The stun grenades thrown at people…

These every day occurrences…rather, every Friday.

The villagers of Bil’in protesting a wall.

A nonviolent protest.

And every time (every fucking time) the Israelis disperse the crowd by means of violence.

People die.

People holding nothing but Palestinian flags.

Unarmed.

In the middle of fucking nowhere.

But it’s THEIR nowhere!

It’s where the olives grow.

“Hey…your wall has cut us off from the trees. Our trees are now on your side of the wall.”

This film, 5 Broken Cameras, shows the struggle of a filmmaker who suffered more in making this film over five years than Jean-Luc Godard suffered making films over a lifetime.

And yet, Godard is the best of the Westerners.

The only one with a conscience.

He was in Palestine in the 70s.

No other filmmaker comes close to the integrity of Godard.

Except for Emad “The Real Deal” Burnat.

Immense credit is due to the Israelis who joined the struggle with their Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Co-director Guy Davidi was one.

Immense credit is due to Kino Lorber for releasing this film.

Immense credit is due to Hulu for currently streaming this film.

Last I checked, it was also available on Apple iTunes. Great work, Apple!

Emad Burnat threatens to unseat Abbas Kiarostami as the most relevant Middle Eastern director.

Emad Burnat lays his cards on the table in a metaphorical game of poker with Abdellatif Kechiche.

There are real tears to be cried, do you understand?

I like a good lesbian fuckfest as much as the next bloke, but these are real tears, do you understand, Adèle Exarchopoulos?

We want to see beauty. We want to see stories which mirror our pathetic little lives.

But 5 Broken Cameras shows you hell on Earth.

Palestine.

Norman Finkelstein is a two-face Janus (which is to say, a Janus).

And so am I.

But I am so out of fear.

I am human.

[Finkelstein attacked BDS for not boycotting 5 Broken Cameras. That’s an intel op move. Princeton. Princeton.]

If you’re not afraid to post something, then it’s probably not important.

-PD

6 Comments

Au Hasard Balthazar [1966)

If life has no meaning, then do not continue to the next sentence.

Thank you.

For those of you still reading.

You must excuse my reliance on 1/3rd of the trivium (to the detriment of the remainder).

It must be rhetoric which I employ.

Like a donkey.

No.

It doesn’t work that way.

But for those of us in poverty and misery.

How do we express our futile existences?

By affirming their meanings.

Their meaningfulness.

You have not worked your whole life for nothing.

You worked to survive.

But you survived for others.

You loved. You cared.

You were curious.

Too curious to let the human race go.

And so, slow and easy does it goes [sic]…the autumn of your years.

Perhaps.

Another spring.

Hope. Eternal.

Robert Bresson slips a note under our door.

A key.

At first viewing it is dull. Ugly.

Like a donkey.

Yes.

But Bresson knew Beethoven. Concision of expression.

Economy of means.

It is no wonder that we hear Schubert throughout this film.

And no wonder that Schubert is Philip Glass’ favorite composer.

Those ostinati. Figured bass.

Even simpler than Alberti.

More like a rail fence transposition.

Or a Caesar shift cipher.

Ostinato. Obstinate.

Like the donkey.

But I have patiently borne the humiliation.

I am still a youthful beast of burden.

And yet I know my hooves.

I am a genius.

A four-legged mathematician.

Give me three digits…and a single digit.

And I multiply.

I fecundate the field with feathery flowers.

Four digits.

Do I hear five?

With a memory like an elephant.

A stare like a tiger.

And a harangue like a polar bear.

But look how he shivers.

The donkey.

So humble as to not say a word.

Perhaps it was the wisdom of salt.

Salt of the earth.

A wise ass.

Yes, forever in trouble. With my pride.

Getting kicked in the rump.

But these are really nasty assaults.

The other side of James Dean.

François Lafarge as Gérard is a real asshole.

Not enough love at home.

Feels a need to punch donkeys.

[pause]

Quite literally…the world comes to life through Bresson’s filmmaking.

Prostitutes pop up.

Pimps prance and preen.

But here we have “merely” sexual assault.

A first step in losing the ability to feel anything.

Numb.

And we have rape (through allusion, of course).

Gérard toots his horn.

Literally.

The other side of the James Dean coin.

The underside of Jean-Paul Belmondo.

A disproportionate riposte courtesy of the one filmmaker with the balls to be simple.

So simple.

On first glance it is nothing.

A donkey.

But live a few years.

And then revisit.

It is a novel.

It contains everything.

We can’t catch it because it doesn’t pop out at us in color.

One way would be to say that no one has ever looked more sad on screen than Anne Wiazemsky here.

Before Godard.

Perhaps a first conversation.

A nervousness.

It was through Wiazemsky that Bresson told this tale.

To teach the New Wave.

They hadn’t learned all the lessons yet.

He wasn’t done speaking.

The quiet tone of an old man…

I want to tell you more more more.

But this is best secret.

To appreciate the simple things.

Before they are gone.

The patient animals.

So gentle in their existence.

Not presuming.

Not running. Not hustling.

The pack-animals.

We know this look.

In cats. In dogs.

This wisdom.

We laugh at their carefree insolence.

But they have shown the way.

Such resilience!

Such love…

And we are taken in.

Our hearts are melted.

Yes.

Few moments in cinema feel more lonely than the end of Au Hasard Balthazar.

It is almost unbearable.

The quiet dignity of humanity being shamed.

How could we ever forget our love.

For even a second.

When we rub two sticks together at such an eyelevel perspective, the meaning of life is very clear.

But unutterable.

-PD

2 Comments

Umberto D. [1952)

Unglamorous stories.

That is what Italy brought us in the post-war years.

And every “new wave” which has followed owes a debt to the masters like De Sica.

Perhaps you know Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves).

Don’t stop there, dear friend.

Because here we have the precursor to Dante Remus Lazarescu.

Sure. There is some humor in Umberto D. A very, very dark humor.

As with Moartea domnului Lăzărescu.

But mostly there is beauty.

Sadness.

Reality.

Cinema.

There is the little dog Flike. Not Flicka, but Flike (rhymes with psych). Or bike.

Flike. Like Céline’s cat Bebert.

And then there is the stunning (STUNNING) acting of Carlo Battisti as Umberto.

There are few performances which can equal it.

Ioan Fiscuteanu did it as Lazarescu.

And that’s about it.

Rarefied air…these two actors.

Let me put it another way. Umberto D. was Ingmar Bergman’s favorite film. Do you know what I mean?

The director of Smultronstället and Sommaren med Monika.

Picked one film. And this was it.

Appropriately, this was Carlo Battisti’s only film role ever.

As the star of Umberto D.

He wasn’t an actor. He was a linguist.

God damn…

It’s just unreal how good this film is!

But we must also give credit to the indispensable Maria-Pia Casilio.

It is through her eyes that we see the ants…formica in Italian.

In English, we think of a hard composite material. Formica. A table top.

But a sort of false cognate brings us back to the archetype which Dalí and Buñuel so evocatively exploited in Un Chien Andalou. That was 1929. A film. The famous eyeball which gets “edited”. And then the ants were back in La persistència de la memòria. A painting. Soft clocks. You know the one. And the only differences between Spanish and Catalan in this case are the diacritical marks.

But she burns paper. To chase the ants. And the stray cat prowls the roof at night soft as a snowflake. And the grated skylight is her canvas to dream stretched out in her bed. And nothing is more morose than a contemplative face at the window looking out on a dingy world.

We sense it did not go easily for Italy. After the war. Because when you choose the wrong side you will be punished.

And though Germany was divided and Berlin was the most surreal example of this (being wholly within East Germany…like a Teutonic Swaziland–a Lesotho leitmotiv), Italy still suffered. We see it in Rossellini. And we see it here.

Neorealism. A update on the operas of Mascagni and Leoncavallo. A continuation of Zola. A nod to Dostoyevsky.

Verismo.

The star is an old man. He is not really a hero. He doesn’t save the world. There aren’t explosions.

But (BUT)

he does something most extraordinary. He survives…for a time. What a miracle!

Ah! The miracle of everyday life. We have survived another year. Another day!

Do you think there will be a war?

[Shame. The shame of having to ask for help. Begging for the first time.]

When your bed is a joke. Newspapers and dust. And there is a goddamned hole in your wall. Perhaps.

A missile. Or The Landlord’s Game (which became Monopoly).

When you are cold with a fever. As an elderly person. All your glamorous days have passed.

And you need your coat just to provide a little more warmth. On top of the blanket. To make it through the night.

As long.

As long as this film survives, humanity has a chance.

Really.

-PD

5 Comments

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